YOUR MP WRITES (From Worcester News)

YOUR MP WRITES

9:43am Thursday 6th December 2007

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Last week I asked the Prime Minister a question: “How were the public monies lent to Northern Rock funded? Where in particular did the Bank of England suddenly find a spare £25 billion?”
To this, answer came there none.
Nor was there apparently much general concern, for instance in the press, that the Government would not say where they had found, out of the blue, an amount of money almost equal to the entire defence budget in order to bail out one medium sized mortgage lender.
That was last week’s crisis and not to be confused with this week’s one. In the modern jargon the ‘conversation’ had ‘moved on’.
Writing in the Independent newspaper the day after I asked my question, Simon Carr commented, exceptionally: “Michael Spicer asked a brilliant question: where did the Bank of England find a spare £25bn to bail out Northern Rock? Yes, where? We heard no more of it. Oh, if only we didn’t have the attention span of mayflies!”
It is all symptomatic of a profound problem.
For the past two or three years government in this country has come to a halt. Nothing is resolved. Each crisis is only ended by being surpassed by another.
‘Cash for honours’ becomes Blair’s resignation becomes Brown’s succession, becomes the aborted General Election, becomes the Northern Rock debacle becomes the lost personal data of 25 million people becomes the crime of wrongfully donating to the Labour Party.
Hard policy issues such as rising taxation, loosely controlled immigration, the rise of anti-social behaviour, the failure to reform the health service, the continuing morass of the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, the inadequacy of the state pension and the decline of private ones, are all forgotten in the swirl of scandal and general distraction, one event obliterating the last.
And so, returning to my question last week, nothing is resolved, nothing is answered.
Ministers are too busy guarding their own backs, in the most recent instance scared by the possibility of criminal prosecution. What a way to non run a country. No wonder there is such disillusionment with the whole political process.
If this Prime Minister cannot get a grip somebody else will have to be found who can, in which case the sooner the better.